notes: Natural History

Museums depend on the importance of realness. I see the Mona Lisa everywhere, bigger than life, smaller than life, reproduced in print and screen, on billboards and magazines and art history books. But only in the Louvre can I see the real Mona Lisa. Only at the British Museum can I see the real remaining statues from the Parthenon. Everything else is a reproduction, a copy, a fake.

So what does this mean to the natural history museum? Is the stuffed mountain lion any more real than the image of one? The image, to be sure, is two dimensional, but it has the added benefit of showing the lion in his real environment. The mountain lion in the museum sits, stuffed and undignified, in front of a painted evening. The zebra has a crack in his side. the polar bear stays in back storage covered in tarp--too big to fit in the elevator up to the Hall of Mammals.

One hundred and fifty years ago, if someone saw a strange and new animal, the most natural thing in the world to do was kill it and stuff it for display. This was how we learned about the world outside our own experiences. Now, these ornate wooden cabinets are curiosities in of themselves, not just their contents.